More and more functions in vehicles are controlled and supervised electronically. Increasingly, control also components of the vehicle relating to safety, where error behavior cannot be tolerated. For example, this relates to detecting pedal positions, such as for example the brake pedal, or a steering wheel in a vehicle, where high demands are placed on electronic controls.
In particular it must be guaranteed that the measured values: (i) are not falsified and (ii) are up-to-date. In the case of an error at any point in the measuring chain it is important that this error is recognized, securely and quickly.
In order to offer a high degree of security, in spite of this, conventional signal detection and transmission devices have a redundancy by having two lots of components present, with the result that when one of the components malfunctions, the corresponding physical variable is still securely and reliably detected and processed. The conventional solutions measure the physical variable over two completely different signal paths, including duplicated microcontrollers, in order to recognize errors in one of the signal paths by analyzing the plausibility of the two signals.
However, this approach has the disadvantage that, by duplicating the existing components, the outlay is high, and additionally more space is required to house the duplicated components.